Ben Judah - Fragile Empire - How Russia Fell in and Out of Love With Vladimir Putin

So I went to meet Egor Bychkov. This man in his early twenties represents a trend that obsesses Moscow intellectuals for good and ill. The watchword for the post-Soviet intelligentsia has been ‘civil society’. The Soviet Union, with all under the control of the state, infantilized Russians by giving them nothing to take responsibility for. In Yeltsin’s Russia, when the state suddenly declared it no longer assumed the responsibility to provide for them, it created a social vacuum in the country. The post-Soviet state was responsible for nothing, whilst post-homo Sovieticus was also responsible for nothing. The metaphor for this sorry state of affairs became the stairwell. The privatized flats people lived in were immaculate, but the common stairwells, for which the state no longer held responsibility were neglected, filthy and almost always foul. They stood for the complete disregard for public space in a privatized Russia.

Hope, for the intelligentsia, was supposed to lie amongst ‘civil society’. Average Russians were expected to slowly emerge from a post-totalitarian mindset and assume responsibility through NGOs, charity and activism. Though part of such thinking, like in the USA, was the hint that people should ‘do for themselves’ what the state had chosen not to pay for, there was also a distinctly post-Soviet absence of social engagement by the older generation and the new middle class. ‘At first we didn’t understand the country was falling apart,’ as Surkov put it. 25

Egor Bychkov and the ‘City Without Drugs’ was both exactly the kind of organization the intelligentsia had been waiting for and the kind of movement they deeply feared. Like most things in Putin’s Russia this ‘NGO’ was born at the crossroads of seemingly contradictory forces. It is a ‘civil society initiative’, but at the same time it carries many of the aggressive, paranoid and nationalistic memes of Putinism itself. It is an organization that describes itself as anti-authoritarian, but born not out of the fight against social oppression, but from where the state is weak.

The ‘City Without Drugs’ began at the beginning of Putin’s reign, in 2000. The drugs rate had exploded 500 per cent since 1992. 26In Sverdlovsk region the streets of its capital Ekaterinburg, the locals say, had turned into ‘shooting galleries’ and dealers hovered in every stairwell. Its founder is a man who captured the shift in a generation of young men in the Urals from the wanton, often joyful embrace of 1990s chaos and criminality to an overwhelming rejection of it and craving for moral, political and social order. That man was Evgeny Roizman. He is a social activist with a criminal past, a Russian nationalist proud to be half-Jewish, who leads an ‘NGO’ fighting the drugs trade and aiming to cure addicts with the methods of a criminal gang, who runs a system of private ‘re-education’ camps, whilst also an icon-collector and a loving father of three.

His machine is notorious, provoking pained shivers when mentioned amongst the ‘democratic aristocrats’ of the capital. Not only do Roizman and his men intimidate drug dealers, taking them to the police, they try to cure people in several ‘clinics’ where no medically grounded treatment is practised. Addicts were chained to their beds, fed only on garlic, bread and water, then made to do work restoring ruined churches. The cuffs have now been dropped, but the clinics still operate without a single heroin substitute and are clouded in rumours and court cases concerning beatings and murders. This approach makes no sense according to modern medicine. Roizman’s enemies said that instead of clinics he had built a private labour-camp system based on quack counter-narcotics.

With a few exceptions, almost all the leaders of the Russian opposition have told me privately they would let the North Caucasus go. The issues that obsess them are efficiency and immigration, public health and honesty – coming together in hysteria about corruption. The health and purity, not the territorial integrity of the nation: the next national leader will have to bring these together in a way that resonates nationally in the manner that Roizman has done locally. He will have to be someone who somehow speaks to the regions.

The future of Russian politics sounds like Roizman. He, not Putin, is the most popular politician in Nizhny Tagil. To say this man has an odd office is an understatement: his headquarters in nearby Ekaterinburg are in a carved, wooden tsarist building on a street of nondescript blocks with no sense of history, that could be anywhere in Moscow, or anywhere in the developed world. But out in front Roizman has a made a graveyard. It is for buildings. The twenty-odd orthodox crosses are there to remember, and to express his rage, that such beautiful, tsarist wood architecture, the wood cut like frost-flowers, could be demolished by lawless developers.

His hallways are covered by his clumsy paintings of gouache woodlands and moon-eyed peasants in primary colours, his office a cluttered jumble, the colliding emblems of a political agitator and the mementos of a Jewish poet. Above a banner advertising his blog – ‘Strength in Truth’, printed out a dozen times in red and blue – are his framed portraits: a poster of Yuri Gagarin beside a photo of the Russian Patriarch, a sword hanging between them and the fading mugshots of two fallen comrades. An old election poster of his unshaven stare, ‘Peace Upon All’, doubles as a calendar. To the left the glint of an embossed gold Torah, to the right three huge files labelled Gypsies, Tajiks, Drugs.

How this all began, he says: ‘When you see what is happening to your country and you see it like a house in flames. I wanted to put out those flames and stop the fire. The government wasn’t doing it. So I decided I had to do it.’

The vigilante king passed me a leaflet that was covered in photos of scabbed children and half-dead young women entitled ‘Russians Killing Russians’, and he wasted no time in telling me why he was at war:

‘We are a dying nation. The biggest threat to the country is power that lives for power itself. The Russians are dying out. The demographic situation is worsened by immigrants, then by emigrants, then made sicker still by alcoholism, drugs and the continued collapse of medical care. We are a dying country.’

This is also – as his files suggest – an ethnic battle in a country flooded with a tidal wave of Muslim migrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia. ‘The City Without Drugs’ began quite simply as a war – there were lots of Gypsies, lots of Tajiks selling drugs on every street corner. I rose up and fought back.’ And nothing through his eyes has changed since the war began. ‘Of course all the drugs in this city are sold by Gypsies and Tajiks.’ At my doubtful expression, he shrugs: ‘You should go to the Gypsy village and see how they live there.’

Roizman is on the same page as the average Russian and on the opposite one to Putin when it comes to empire – he rejects the idea that Muslim Central Asia is part of one ‘post-Soviet space’ that should be preserved. Those out there – Tajiks, Kyrgyz, Uzbeks – are not part of the family like those from Ukraine and Belarus. They are not welcome in their millions in Russia. He urgently wants a visa wall erected against them, as do most popular opposition figures and a majority of Russians I have spoken to. He snarls: ‘The whole problem is that we have no border with Central Asia. We have no visa regime. The clans that run Tajikistan live by the drugs trade. This means that Russia was hit by a drugs tsunami in the 1990s when drugs began to flood north from Tajikistan and Afghanistan after the collapse of Soviet power and Soviet borders. It hit society when it was at its very weakest.’

As we speak, the Roizman ‘men’ slip in and out of the room as he reclines in an armchair to expound on the failure of the state. They bring photos of stacks of heroin on their iPhones and mutter into his ear about the junkies – ‘Boss, Boss’. If you did not know he was fighting drugs, blink and it would look like Roizman was dealing them. These are his personal army, many of them ‘cured’ by him, and who substitute for the state in Ekaterinburg’s heroin wars. ‘The government simply cannot operate against this. The government cannot deal with this… The country is a dinosaur. This is why I have taken the war on drugs into my own hands – and this is not wrong, simply because there is no war being waged by the authorities.’